The Love Song of the Last Time Lord
by cryptically
Summary: NineRose. The Doctor adjusts to having a companion again and finds himself, among all other impossible things, falling for her. Can he get over her being human to tell her how he feels, or will he leave her in the dark?
1. Restless Nights at World's End

**Author's Note**:

Being inspired by "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," each chapter will begin with a few lines from T. S. Eliot's piece. It is one of my favorite poems, and I enjoyed writing fanfic to it. I hope that this is as much fun for you, the reader, to peruse as it was for me to create.

As always,

--cy.

* * *

_Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,_

_The muttering retreats__  
_

_Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels_

-o-

This place wasn't even half-deserted. It was empty. She was getting a full dose of absolutely unadulterated desertion right now: no other living soul, no motion but the movement of the sun filter and that kind, feminine voice telling her that it was going down, down, down...

As the uninhibited rays began to crisp the tops of the walls, Rose Tyler gave an involuntary gasp and came to a startling revelation: what people most often fail to notice tends to be most important in the end.

It was more startling because she wasn't one for drawing platitudes, least of all in life-threatening situations, rather than for its content. Still, if ever there was an occasion for making sweeping statements about life, this was it. Trapped behind a door with no help coming and sunlight streaming down the wall to broil her, there really wasn't much else to do. Funny thing, this. Working as a shop girl after failing to earn enough A-levels to get a real job and this was now her highest aspiration: not managing to get burnt to a crisp.

Maybe he'd just forgotten her and run off with the tree.

It wasn't all that unlikely she'd been overlooked. Platform One had the end of the world to watch, after all, and that had been the reason they'd come here, hadn't it? To watch the world burn up, which was probably what the Doctor was doing, along with all of the other guests.

Just not with her.

Had she read too much into his offer, into him? Was she nothing more than a passing fancy to this man, just a human that wised up like that man Clive had, but only good enough to keep around for so long? Yeah, she'd saved him once, but he'd saved her first. Twice. He didn't even owe her.

It had all been too good to be true, anyway. A phone that could call across time and space, a phone box, moreover, that could take you anywhere you could dream of going, and a fellow traveler about as mysterious as their destinations-- she should have known that it would end like this. The real world was never as kind as the stories you read or the hopes you had for it. It was full of unforeseen dangers, vicious twists, and always so much happening that you failed to notice the little, essential things.

Like, for example, that a supernova's light could melt the skin from her bones, turn her to soup in seconds, then boil her to gas. Or maybe even just skip the liquid phase and take her from solid to vapor. She'd thought this business with the party and being the last human was all great fun, especially rubbing it in Cassandra's flat face, but always doubting that it could possibly be real. Now it was all so real that it was going to kill her.

She pounded on the lower part of the door as the light streamed overhead, singeing the ceiling and crackling pieces off the middle parts of the wall. This was it: one night out in high society to consort with aliens, no promises, no guarantees. She was just unlucky and trapped in a locked room.

It was just that--she thought that things would be different with him. Wrestling with that plastic arm over her coffee table, that feeling of his hand in hers as the two of them ran through the streets of London at night: it had all spelled out a very different ending than dying alone and crispy five billion years into the future.

Biting her lip, Rose considered. How big was the space station? A computer malfunction couldn't go ignored like this, not five billion years into the future. Failing that, surely someone would come to the viewing gallery--people must be on their way, the earth was exploding after all--

"Help! Let me out!" She screamed, throat hurting from the sudden effort.

Blinding light crisscrossed overhead and bit into the wall. Rose called for help again, her voice cracking as worryingly as the viewing window opposite her. It was amazing that she could hear anything at all above the pounding of her heart and the receding sun filter, but she did, even though it seemed to come from an infinity away: a sigh and the words, "Oh, it would be you."

-o-

It would be her. He thinks, watching as the figure in a pink hoodie gazes out the window of the empty foyer, watching chunks of rock flying past on their way into space. The light from the sun's supernova makes everything in the room seem darker, more dramatic, like a play that's approaching its climax. He isn't sure if he wants more of that, more stories with unhappy endings and more darkness to run from. He's been trying to escape the past for so long but it follows him wherever he goes, and everything he touches comes to darkness in one way or another, from the future of civilizations to the small, flickering life of a human girl.

She doesn't know it yet and maybe she never will, but there should have been at least two more representatives from alien cultures that made their appearances at Platform One tonight. He has long had the rise and fall of species so practiced and learnt he could recite it like reading words written on the inside of his skull. But, this--everything he knows is caught in a slow vanishing: the Time War is extending its dark arm to new civilizations, wiping more and more out and leaving gaps for others to propel themselves forward. History is rewriting itself from all angles--he can feel it, chipping away gently at him even as he stands there, watching her at the sill.

He'd rather not wait for it to catch up to him.

He'd rather grab her arm and run! like before, run off to some mad new adventure and never look back on this swirl of destruction and molten rock. He's had too much of looking back, but now that's he's looking forward, he can't say he finds the view any more enviable. Rose is not just Rose. She's a human, fragile and frangible, closed-minded at the worst of times, fantastic at the best, but a human, and just that.

Perhaps after spending so much time alone the differences have blurred in his mind. Relearning them inch by inch is tortuous, surprising him at every turn, always reminding him that she's cut from a different cloth and that no matter what they go through together, no matter how close their patterns seem, they will never be the same.

A small voice tells him that traveling solo would have been better, much more practical. None of this domesticity to worry about or potential clumsy death. Just him and the TARDIS, the whole universe lying open before him like a cracked chestnut, ripe for exploration and tasting. He'd been doing it for so long, it seems almost natural. So why change now? Rather, why go back to the way it was?

Part of him doesn't want to answer, to admit that it's been more lonely than it's worth, traveling in a party of one and longing for the past while running from it. And it's not just one past--it's a whole slew of pasts, all of them his, all of them shared with others.

He checks his watch before going over to meet her, the heels of his shoes clicking out a soft rhythm on the ballroom floor.

The watch does not tell the time: he already has the singing of the date a pale sweetness on his tongue and the passage of the seconds dancing across the back of his knuckles like a gold coin. Rather, it is to assure himself of something, something even he isn't quite certain about, other than that it is happening. The hour hand is squarely on the nine and the minute hand rests on the two. He takes a deep breath, relishing the change, the freshness, and walks over to his companion, one hand gripping the other's wrist behind his back.

"Come along. Too much of that and I'll be hard-pressed to find anything that'll impress you anymore."

She smiles and he takes her hand in his.

"You know, I thought you'd forgotten me." She says at last. Her face looks flushed, but it might just be the vibrant red of the planet's core reflecting through the window.

He rolls his eyes. Humans. "Well, that's being blunt."

Her look of mock offense--or is it real hurt? It's taking him too long to judge which--triggers a hasty amendment. "No beating around with bush with you. Straight to the point." He spades his hands in his pockets amiably, but refrains from answering the question-that-is-not-a-question.

Rose doesn't give up. "You wouldn't have left me there, right?"

He remembers plastic arms restraining him, yelling at her to run and leave him, and that strange feeling he'd gotten when he'd seen her swinging down a rope to his rescue. Hope, or shock that there was something else out there in the universe that understood?

His voice is a little hoarse at first, but he hides it wonderfully. "No, course not! What do you think your mum would do to me, eh?" He grimaces theatrically. "Probably have me put on a spit and roasted."

The two of them laugh as they reach the blue box and his thoughts have left the watch and its new anomaly: for the entirety he's been, well, _him_, the minute hand has remained steadfast on the one. Now it's reading two, like so many other things around him. He's the Doctor plus one, no longer solitary but partnered. But it holds a tacit warning: things have been set in motion, whether for good or ill, and they are just about to begin.

And that's just the way he likes it.


	2. A Sawdust Dream

_And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells_

-o-

"Three little pigs." Rose nods at the sign, laughing. "What a place to get chips."

The Doctor arches an eyebrow. "Pardon?"

His hoodie-clad companion gestures to the sign above the establishment they're about to enter: The Third Little Pig's Place. The Doctor frowns.

"I always wonder. What's so special about the third one?"

Rose laughs. "You travel all over time and space and you don't know Earth fairy tales?" She tuts, clearly disapproving though thoroughly relishing the opportunity to flaunt her knowledge for once. Her triumph, however, is short-lived.

"Like I could escape those. The third little pig's the one that had the best house, but apart from his house, was there really anything that different about him from the other two pigs?"

Biting her lip a bit and not quite sure how to respond, Rose enters the restaurant, smiling by the time a waitress shows her to a table. The Doctor can so be vastly different sometimes, so otherworldly that she doesn't know what to make of him. Though, Rose admits wryly as she browses the menu, already knowing what she wants, the reason she gets so surprised is probably because she can't help but think of him as human, even though she knows he's not.

Weird, that.

She watches him over the top of her menu as he returns from his inspection of the door, kicking up some of the sawdust on the floor on his way over. His easy grace might already be enough to class him as a totally different species from the inhabitants of this place, the way his jacket furls out behind him slightly, or how his eyes sweep across the tables and booths around them: all of it effortless, all of it perfect.

He pulls down her menu. "You know, everybody's staring."

Rose looks around. A few older women in a corner are glancing their way and whispering feverishly, and yeah, that bloke by the wall's got a case of the wandering eyes, but apart from them most everyone else seems to be minding their own business. She shrugs. "Don't see why."

Rolling his eyes, the Doctor crosses his arms and grimaces with the air of one about to visit a topic particularly repellent. "Bet your mum would have some choice words for you, seen in the company of someone so much your senior."

"Oh, is that it?" Rose responds incredulously, craning her head around the menu and the Doctor's shoulder. "They think you're too old to be taking a girl out to chips? Good thing I'm treating, then."

He doesn't respond, just plays with the straws the waitress deposits on their table when she presents them with two glasses of water and takes their order. When she leaves, he's still watching the crowds pass outside the window, hands aimlessly playing with the wrappers.

"Don't mind 'em." Rose finishes, not sure if this is the source of her companion's silence or not. "They're going to gossip anyway, so we're probably just doing someone else a favor by distracting them."

"It's not that." He says, though not offering a hint as to what it really is. His eyes linger on people waiting for a bus and boarding taxis, and for the first time, she notices the lonely look they get when he tapers off sometimes, sort of like catching someone with bags under their eyes in the morning before they can disguise it. Rose watches him quietly for a while, but then spots the straw wrappers lying idly in his hands and gasps.

"How'd you do that?"

A miniature tray of chips with drink, constructed, Rose guesses, from some expert folding of the wrappers, sits delicately on his finger tip. She oogles it for a few moments, and fails to notice at first when the waitress brings her the real version of the papercraft. The Doctor laughs, his expression brightening at her surprise on seeing the chips before her, his effervescent smile returning as he answers her question.

"Just got held up once, had a lot of folding manuals handy and a lot of stuff to fold lying around. Nothing really."

"No way," Rose comments, turning the super-small tray over in her hand as she munches on a fresh chip from their own tray. "This beats the pants off my origami book at home."

He snorts, munching on a chip himself. "Paper folding, ha. Just wait 'til you see this with metal or fluids."

And to her delight, he flicks water droplets out of the straw from his drink and, to Rose's growing astonishment, proceeds to fold the plastic straw into an inch-high replica of the TARDIS, exact to the last detail. She looks at him for permission to pick it up and he nods. On closer inspection, she sees that the folded box is completely see-through, except for the windows, where the last droplets of water from the straw slosh around in the panes. It even has a tiny light on top and a sign on the doors whose words she can barely make out, but has already memorized.

For a few minutes, Rose can't help but stare at it and keep turning it around in her hands, new details popping up at her with each revolution. The Doctor looks pleased and sneaks a few chips while she remains fascinated.

Eventually, he resorts to waving a chip under her nose to get her attention. "Oi!"

Rose's eyes snap up and the Doctor shakes his head. "Sorry, what?"

"You were getting mesmerized."

Rose gives him a look and then holds up the little TARDIS. "Can I keep this?"

She expects him to say something snarky, but he just mouths the word "humans" with some exasperation and a faint smirk. "If you like." He replies neutrally.

She grins, showing a flash of pink tongue in anticipation, takes out her mobile, and begins fiddling with it and a clear strap. "Just the thing for a super-phone."

When she's finished, she holds up her handiwork for approval, the tiny TARDIS spinning gently, attached to the mobile as a charm. He smiles, but then, remembering where they are and just whom that phone last called, his mood sours.

"So, what, off to your mum's now?" He asks, dreading the answer.

Rose puckers her lips, considering. "I don't feel like going home just yet. I mean, it feels like we've barely started, only going to one place and all. 'Course," she continues, a mischievous grin spreading across her features, "if that's all you can do for the time being, then sure, Mum's is a good idea for a bit of rest. It's jus' that I was kinda hoping that a Time Lord could, you know--"

She trails off tantalizingly, on the verge of a mock sigh and a half-wish. The Doctor is looking at her, his mouth open slightly and smiling at her as though he hardly believes what he's hearing.

"You think that this is the limit of my frankly fantastic time machine?" His eyes dance with blue fire at the challenge. She's just upped the stakes and he's not backing down, not now, not ever. "You haven't seen anything yet, Rose Tyler."

And with that, he grabs her hand, and they're off again--running into the crowds of Piccadilly Circus, through the sunlit London streets, and soon enough, farther than anyone else in London has ever been. They laugh as they nearly collide with passersby and at the scandalized looks a group of old ladies give them as they dash past, already off to their next adventure.

At that moment, Rose Tyler knows that she has, for the first time in her life, finally found where she's supposed to be. It's not in a shop, not really a job, and never at a set location. Even though she's visited and will visit many other places, even though she knows that there have been risks and always will be, this is it. She's faced danger twice already: with shop models and living plastic, then the end of the world. She's seen death approach like an oncoming storm, looked it in the eyes, and she'd do it again, willingly, as long as she can keep living like this: like the sun's etching her silhouette golden into the horizon behind them, like the world is racing as fast as her heart, like time is singing to them on the wind and she'll never have to give up the feeling of her hand firmly clasped in his.


	3. Ghosts and a Tedious Argument

_Streets that follow like a tedious argument _

_Of insidious intent_

_To lead you to an overwhelming question..._

-o-

He stands in the middle of a snowy street, powdery flakes attaching themselves to his leather jacket, each with all the ferocity of a shopgirl who once clung to his arm for dear life as she ran through a department store's basement. The cold is working its way closer through his clothes, the wind weaving him a new garment underneath his navy jumper, burrowing into his skin and tightening over his hearts.

Everything is numbing out--the flabbergasted cries of the man behind him are silenced by the stillness of the snow, ever-encroaching and deafening; the icy brush of each storm gust quivers unnoticed on his skin. His keen sense of taste, which had just before been delighting in the dry Cardiff air pock-marked with moisture, has staled in his mouth and no odors waft to his nose but those of chloroform and raw panic. Sight is the only sense that's been preserved, even become more vibrant in the crisis: the flash of her hair as it disappeared into the hearse is still seared into his vision, flawless--pure gold vanishing against dark wood, the only bright thing in this cold city winking out.

-o-

The black and burgundy was what really set it off.

He'd already changed--wasn't that always the case? Humans, taking so long to get themselves ready for anything, building their empires, space travel and exploration, going out at night--and had decided to spend the time waiting doing some fine-tuning.

He circled around the main room, hands lingering on the walls, brushing over the controls that hummed pleasantly under his fingertips. He'd known this place inside out, but somehow now it was so much more alive. Everything had seemed darker, rusted out, desperate. Now, it was as though the interior had been repainted and brightened, the whole thing made new.

Shaking his head, he sat in one of the chairs and smiled wryly to himself. Perhaps he'd been without a companion for too long.

Even the TARDIS had been unused to ferrying new passengers-- the tremors didn't bother the Doctor, but Rose had become very good friends with the floor.

"You can't do that to her just yet," he murmured to the engine, giving the console a little pat before removing a floor board and hopping in, "well, I suppose you can, but at least let her get her balance a bit more. Trip after next, she's free game. Promise." He smiled and waggled a pinky finger at the machine's innards, then clasped it around a wire. "Right, so, down to business."

It only took him a few moments to become thoroughly engrossed in the workings of the machine, which was all it really ever took him. So absorbed was he that he hadn't noticed the footsteps approaching until a shiny black shoe presented itself to him regally at eye level.

"Well, what d'you think?" Rose grinned, giving him a mock curtsy. "This eighteen-sixty enough for you?"

He looked up. Her blonde hair was like a spark against the midnight black and dark reds of her gown, lighting up everything from her eyes to her smile, to the shine of her tongue as she tucked it between her teeth...

The words escaped before he knew it.

"You're beautiful."

She laughed, not noticing his split-second shock or the way he quickly turned his gaze back to the TARDIS rather than meet hers, seemingly intent on his work, while his mind feverishly probed where the statement had come from. Trying to recover himself, he hastily amended, "For a human, anyway."

That quirk of her lips meant a retort was forthcoming--and most probably one she didn't want to hear the answer to, though she was going to ask anyway-- but as soon as he made a move toward the door, all was forgotten.

He watched her as she tasted the snow on her tongue, savoring it like a fine vintage from a foreign country: the Christmas that only happened once but that they could have a hundred thousand times, all of them the golden flickering of streetlights that shone in her hair.

-o-

He hails the nearest coach. Not really hails, more like commandeers, actually, but it's for a good cause. A part of him is excited now: how long has it been since he's ridden in a carriage with horses, _real_ horses, going on a real chase? Granted, right about now he wouldn't have said no to a lightening-fast digisteed, but this is eighteen-sixty-nine and when your friend has just been kidnapped by undertakers you make due with what's available.

Once the driver's been directed, the Doctor's eyes are once again scanning the road, watching the snow swept in swirls before the horses' hooves, beckoning him onwards, each gust an inviting finger to some new danger. "Hold on." He whispers to the frigid air.

"I think not!" A very angry voice responds as the coach clatters into motion. "I should hope that you would cease and desist any 'holding on' in my coach and make a hasty exit before I call a constable."

The carriage bumps over a rough stretch and the Doctor turns and finds a livid man in coat tails and dress shirt sitting next to him, not looking pleased at all with his fellow passenger. The Doctor's mouth opens slightly, a guilty smile beginning to spread over his features. "Ah. About that..."

"Problem, Mr. Dickens?"

The man next to him is about to answer his driver's question when everything snaps into place-- the time, the location, the reading he'd burst in on, well, not like it hadn't already been interrupted when he got there--when the Doctor cuts in.

"Charles Dickens? _The_ Charles Dickens?"

-o-

They didn't have time to get anything more than a passing glance at the posters in the illuminated cases on their way up to the auditorium because of the screams. She could have run one of two ways: toward them or away from them. He shouldn't have been surprised when Rose raced ahead to the doors, throwing them open with him as cries of fright pealed through the audience. His smile then hadn't been because of the gas spirits --alright, maybe a little bit of it had been--but because she was the only person rushing toward the old woman as the lady crumpled to the floor. It wasn't that she felt the need to make up for Platform One, for the alien comments, or for anything; this was just Rose, acting on whatever first impulse got her way and running with it, foolish or not.

Smiling, he turned away from the fleeing audience and faced the man on the stage, pestering him with questions. Rose's voice reached his ears with fresh determination and a rare, indomitable tenor as she pursued the woman out.

Everything was moving faster now--the spirits swirled with a new vigor, the crowd roiled and pushed their way to the exits so unlike the gentle class they were, and both his hearts were racing at a forgotten pace. He was in the thick of things, doing exactly what he wanted, getting caught up, sucked in, and pulled in a million different directions, except now he had someone to go down the paths that he couldn't.

It was fantastic.

-o-

Dickens settles down with each compliment, and when the Doctor tells him that his young female friend is in trouble, the author about doubles the speed of the coach. For this, the Doctor is grateful and the two of them lapse into a tense, busy silence, Dickens trying to decipher the lettering on the back of the hearse for clues, the Doctor, already knowing what the letters say, watching the black box as it makes its unruly turns deeper and deeper into the city.

"I shouldn't have said that." The Doctor muses to himself, eyes transfixed by the snow the horses are kicking up in their wake.

Dickens looks amused. "Expressing one's care for one's ward-- especially under such circumstances as these-- hardly seem like unfit words to be spoken." The writer's gaze trails after the coach in front of them. "Rather, it's so common it makes an extremely trite device in most tales, despite its often being so true."

The Doctor's head jerks away from the window, a cornered expression clouding his features. A moment passes, and then he breaks into a relived grin. "Oh, no, not that."

"Ah?" The writer inquires hopefully, but the only response he receives is a shake of his mysterious companion's head as they draw closer and make the rest of their ride without further comment.

They reach the undertaker's with all the aplomb a rescue party could have. Dickens strides ahead to the door, rapping on the wood with his cane brusquely as the Doctor leans against the house wall in the background, ready to jump in and take his chance whenever it presents itself.

Soon enough, it does: he dashes inside past the maid, hearing the same cry he's heard five billion years in the future and running, not caring one fig about the ghosts in the walls, the protestations of the maid, or the author bumbling after him. The master of the house attempts to stop him--as if! Not when the yells have become screams and pleas and then nothing, the last which worries him most--and the Doctor shifts him aside like a straw doll and dashes to the door, taking a moment to admire the mahogany woodwork before bringing his leg up in one fluid motion and kicking it wide open.

And sure enough, she's there.

-o-

_Oh, do not ask, "What is it_?"

-o-

It all seemed so perfect.

But he's a Time Lord, the last of the Time Lords, and if there's one thing he should know, it's that as soon as anything seems perfect chances are it's going to fall down 'round your ears. And here it is, happening all over again, just when he's tricked himself into thinking that things could be different, that she's really not that much like the others of her species, the rift between them rears its ugly head.

But it _is_ a new morality. It's the way he thinks, has got to think, since he's the only one left and he has to think for all of them now. So many stars have snuffed themselves out, so many races have been left in the dark, un-homed and cast into the bleakness of space, and he knows how it feels to have nothingness licking at the base of his spine, curling around the heels of his boots, knows he can't do that to any other species, not after having it done to himself. Not when they could be saved and he could begin to put things right, repair the hole he tore into countless civilizations and timelines. More than one rift could be mended through that maid, but if his companion's demeanor indicates anything, another one is being torn.

Rose isn't smiling anymore. Her hair is unkempt from her adventure and though she's doing an admirable job of adapting to this life, he can tell that a part of her won't move on this front, remains unshakable.

Her voice, when it comes, is colder than he remembers it. "You can't make that decision for her."

"You just don't like the fact that they're using dead bodies." He retorts. "Something in you just can't stand that, even though it's their only hope, isn't that it?" His face is harder than she's seen it in hours, or is it days? Rose doesn't know it yet, but after witnessing the death of so many beings, so many cultures, the expression is more familiar to him than he cares to admit.

She swallows before responding, both from the harshness of the accusation and the distance in his features. All at once, he seems lightyears away, as alien as those blue creatures on Platform One. "Yeah," she replies, voice growing stronger, angrier, "yeah, I don't like it. 'Cause it's not right, this. This doesn't happen, can't happen. No one would let them do this."

"No human, you mean." He corrects, voice soft.

A chill fury has developed in her, seethed into her eyes. "Does that matter that much to you, then?"

He steps back, hand still resting on the tea table, not caring that Gwen is politely averting her eyes, or that Dickens is edging his way out the door and out of what he thinks is a lovers' quarrel. "Saving lives, yeah. Funny thing, it does." The last syllable casts the air between them into frost.

"Not that." She replies, voice just as frigid, and she almost doesn't sound like Rose in that moment, more like some shade is speaking through her, a howling force greater than anything he's ever seen. She lowers her voice so that Sneed, who's eavesdropping in a corner by the door, doesn't hear. "I mean, being human or not."

"Does you being human and me not matter that much, you mean?" He repeats for clarity, moving closer to her.

She nods and holds her ground at his wintered approach. He meets her eyes, his a blue ice and emotionless enough to condense vapor to solid in one fell stroke. Even before he says it, he can see the tenuous thread between them snap into a thousand fraying pieces.

"Yeah," he breathes, "it does."


	4. Rooms of Yellow Smoke

_In the room where women come and go_

_talking of Michelangelo._

-o-_  
_

The room is by turns filled and emptied. After staring him down (what comment could she have made?), Rose escorts Gwyn to her quarters to rest and decide for herself what she wants to do without the input of others. Dickens goes off to check on his coachman and inform him that they'll be a while. Not wanting to appear without a more pressing task, Sneed retreats to his office, perhaps to complete the paperwork he had to leave off in lieu of this evening's activities, perhaps sensing it's best to leave the Doctor alone.

The Doctor, in the midst of people evacuating the space and holing themselves up elsewhere, stands still and surveys the lamps. As his fingers traipse down the gaslight's piping, he can't help but remember that it always comes to this: them mucking about, entering, leaving, going in circles, fretting about nothing, all the while he stays put and puts things right.

None of this following-after business, no making amends, not for him. She wanted to know, well, now she knew.

He perches on the arm of a chaise-lounge, tiring of his inspections and not much caring for the decorations in the undertaker's room for entertaining. It certainly doesn't look like it's seen many pleasant experiences, much less entertained anyone: everything is coated with a thin sheen of dust that might date back from the Renaissance. The Italian one, mind.

He knows she would have laughed at that, would have asked, "What others?" with an eyebrow raised, thinking that he has to be joking and her eyes widening when she realizes he isn't. Crossing his arms, he glares at the lights again, their dark secrets a hidden code of flickers, and sighs. Not that he wanted to tell her about the myriad other Renaissances that have happened since then, from the Beagle Renaissance (fascinating) to the Fourth Andromeda-Taurian one (decidedly less fascinating), not that he wanted to watch her face morph into laughter and wonderment, not the cool detachment he'd so recently seen. Nope.

Not even a little bit.

He tries to remember the Gelth. He doesn't recall them as a major power in the Time War, but they'd said they'd been one of the higher forms that got swept underfoot in its wake. Rubbing his arms, he shivers, feeling time sifting around him and rewriting itself in accordance with the War. He wishes he could get away from it, but nowhere seems safe, has been safe for ages; he can't name the limits of the Time War's touch, can't even say that it's over yet, because it's not. Wherever he goes, it will be there trailing after him, its dark tendrils uprooting patches of history and things to come just beyond the periphery of his vision.

No matter where he goes or who he goes there with, it will never end, never stop following him.

How could she even begin to understand that? Her life is so simple it's linear; his is criss-crossed almost an infinity of times over, curved and curled past belief. He walks the length of the small room and back to the chaise-lounge, his shoes kicking up little clouds of dust in his passing. She couldn't comprehend being hunted like this, how even time, once his greatest ally, has now developed into something much more sinister, how it haunts him with what it shares and what it doesn't.

She's too human, too innocent to see it. He's been leading himself on, he knows, he's a fool for telling himself that someone like her could understand someone like him. Because no matter how much he forgets sometimes, when they're rushing off, their footprints pressing into the snow and looking nearly identical beside each other, she _is_ human, and that makes all the difference. She'll never see the decay welling up behind them like he does.

Which is why, even though she may despise him for it, he has to save what he can.

-o-

_The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes_

_the yellow smoke rubs its muzzle on the window-panes  
_

-o-

Everything's turning up a foggy mess of yellow.

The cadavers in the morgue are waxen, tinged a sickly shade of pale gold, jaundiced in the lantern light. They move in slumps and jerks, stockily, and it reminds her of the shop models back in London. It's too bad there's no Consciousness (let alone conscience) controlling them this time, she thinks offhandedly as she and the Doctor are backed up against an iron grate, her breath coming faster and faster. Dickens has run off, Gwyn's become a bridge, Sneed's been grabbed and strangled by a man in a white nightshirt. Everything's tinged in odd lights, from the bodies' discoloration to the gleam that dances on the stone walls. The gas swirls so thickly about them that it's difficult not to feel light-headed, and Rose wonders which is going to get to them first: asphyxiation by gas or strangulation by...

"Not very pleasant aliens, are they?" She notes, pressed into the Doctor's left arm as close as she can get. The mob advances, their cold hands grasping, the faces of each attacker just as dead, their expressions fixed and single-mindedly going about their course of action: kill and take over.

The Doctor nods, pulling her with him behind the grate as he hastily shuts and locks it in front of them. This doesn't stop the advance of the Gelth and their new forms, which encroach on the doorway in a slow-moving march. Glancing to her right and left, Rose sees dark tunnels leading deeper and deeper into the mortuary and sucks in a dry breath.

"D'you know there are-"

"Yes." The Doctor replies, still staring straight ahead. "More cadavers in rooms beyond and just a matter of time before the Gelth discover those, too."

Rose nods, suddenly feeling a little headache-y. "Well, s'long as you know." She responds, finishing weakly.

She has to admit, ever since Sneed sat shudderingly back up and announced that he too had joined the legions of Gelth she's felt like this was a losing battle. Next to her, the Doctor's eyes flit from one shambling body to the next, each coming closer to the grate, roping their hands through the spokes. He's got to have an idea, surely he's been in more dire scrapes than this. The Nestene Consciousness was worse then this, right? Right.

Things couldn't really be that bad.

"Can't die in the past, can we?" Rose asks, trying to brighten the mood or reassure herself, backing up against the stone wall with him, avoiding the swiping corpses. "I mean, I'm not even born 'til about a century later, so..." She trails off and feels something in her gut sink as the Doctor shakes his head.

"Time's not like that; it can curl in around itself and eat its own tail if it wants to. And it does. I should know. Long and short of it is," he replies, pressing flat against the wall next to her, his blue eyes flashing in the ghosts' luminescence, "you can be born in the future and die in the past as easily as you can the reverse." He sees the stricken look on her face and adds, "I'm sorry. I got you into this and you were right."

Rose looks away from the grasping hands and the dead fingers shaking the bars of the grate ominously to fix him with a cool but interested look. "Me, the human? Right about something?"

He rolls his eyes. "Oh, don't you start. Here I am, trying to clear my conscience before the end and you go spouting off about _that_."

"You mean you can die, too?" She's genuinely surprised.

"'Course I can!" He cries. "I could have died in any number of extravagant ways from the sack of Troy to intergalactic clashes raging across time and space, and where did I end up? About to be done in by stiffs in Cardiff. Absolutely miserable."

Despite herself, Rose can't help but giggle.

"And you think it's funny." The Doctor sighs, feigning hurt. "I'm baring my soul to you in my darkest hour and you laugh. Typical."

"Well, then," she says, trying to be serious but finding it difficult when he's pretending to look so hopelessly forlorn, "what was I right about? Not letting them through?"

"Seems so at the moment," he grants, seriousness again shifting back into his face, "but that's not what I meant."

She's going to ask what, but he continues, still watching the growing horde of bodies trying to force the grate. His eyes seem far off. "I've seen stars collapse in on themselves like folding chairs, quiet and discreet, like they don't want to disturb anybody on their way out. Name any time period you can think of and I can tell you all about it, ask me every name a place has had or ever will have, the proper way to greet dignitaries from every civilization on this planet- I'll tell you, easy as breathing. But," he looked at her from the corner of his eye, "I forgot something."

She's puzzled until he smiles again, illuminating the dark cellar, and then clasps her hand in his, saying:

"Better with two."

Before Dickens comes in with his brilliant scheme of turning on the gas full strength, before they realize they have a hope of escape, she smiles back at him, just as manically, and he realizes that he's not thinking about dying in a depressingly dank dungeon. Or being strangled by hostile body-snatchers, or that his final moments are about to be spent with a member of a lesser species.

He's thinking about Rose, just Rose, not Rose-the-dull-human but Rose-the-girl-who-keeps-up-when-he-runs, the one who swings down chains to come to his rescue, and who's currently grinning like there's nowhere else she'd rather be than trapped in a morgue with him. And, for some odd reason, he couldn't be more pleased.


End file.
